Nazir Ahmad Mir

Pakistan is undergoing political turmoil once again. Once again an elected prime minister was first removed in July 2017, and then barred from fighting elections for life on April 13, 2018.

• July 2018 |
• Strategic Analysis

Will the Pakistani civilian leadership cease to placate the Islamist forces for their own electoral gain? Will the Army rein in the jihadis it has been using to retain “strategic depth” in Afghanistan?

• March 17, 2017 |
• IDSA Comments

The burgeoning scholarship on the army’s role in nation building, or the lack of it, is unsurprising. In the modern political order, a nation without its own army is hardly imaginable. A crucial relationship exists between the two, which is also a reason for the uneasiness about the army’s pro-active involvement in the nation-making process. Political sociologists have been uncovering striking causal relationships that demonstrate the crucial role of the army and its internal ‘organisation’, ‘control’ and ‘function’ for the subsisting units of the modern world system: nation-states.

• January 2016 |
• Strategic Analysis